Associated Press ROCHESTER, Vt. — With a vigorous shake of a tree limb, small wild apples rain down onto a plastic tarp at an old farmstead in Vermont. David Dolginow, co-founder of Shacksbury Cider, and a colleague then collect the yellow-skinned fruit in milk crates. In their quest for the best apples to make hard cider, they’ve hunted for heritage wild apples on mountain roadsides, in the thickets of old pastures, and in backyards...

Recorder Staff ASHFIELD — After 14 years of research, Thomas Leue has created and patented a unique oil burner that runs on unfiltered, used cooking oil and has about 98 percent less climate impact than burners using conventional heating oil, he says. And now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has notified Leue that the food-waste oil used to power the Yellow Heat oil burner could also generate green credits for every gallon of...

Associated Press ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Typewriter enthusiasts gather at an Albuquerque restaurant to experiment with vintage Smith Coronas. Fans in Boston kneel in a city square and type stories about their lives during a pro-immigration demonstration. A documentary on typewriters featuring Tom Hanks and musician John Mayer is set for release this summer. In the age of smartphones, social media and hacking fears, vintage typewriters...

For Going Green Open the plastic bag and you immediately smell the corn in these Mi Tierra tortillas, said Jorge Sosa proudly. That was far from what it was like when Sosa arrived in western Massachusetts from Mexico in 1992 and opened his first bag of store-bought tortillas. “You couldn’t smell the corn,” he recalls. “I didn’t know at the time, but it was the preservatives, the chemicals, all the things that they put into the...

Associated Press National parks are at the front lines of climate change. The creep of change is playing out in places that Americans have set aside to be preserved for the enjoyment of future generations. A new poster series takes the landscapes that have inspired countless road trips and daydreams of summer vacation and imagines what they’ll look like in 2050 if climate change is allowed to continue unchecked. Hannah Rothstein, a...

Special to Going Green Marie Paynter of Longmeadow often has outdated furniture on her front porch, but that’s her business. Owner of “Chick, Picked & Paynted,” Paynter is an artist and furniture upcycler who is saving the planet one gnarly, dump-destined coffee table at a time. “I try to use unconventional materials in creative ways,” said Paynter, a former psychology student with an analogous passion for creating art out of...